Robert Burton

(1577 - 1640)

In 1599 Robert Burton was made a fellow at Oxford University, where he spent the majority of his “silent, sedentary, solitary” life. Apparently having failed to obtain a patron, Burton complained of being “left behind, as a dolphin on shore, confined to my College, as Diogenes to his tub.” He became a vicar of St. Thomas’ Church in 1616, writing his Anatomy of Melancholy because he felt obligated to “prescribe means how to prevent and cure so universal a malady.”